through homes, work and studio spaces

LungA art festival 2012 – #Day 2

Our second day at LungA was dedicated to independent exhibitions and performances, which where held in various locations, dotted around town. Most artists showed work that they had been working on during the week, but some pieces had been worked on during a longer period of time.

The first event we attended, was an off-venue venture, an exhibition of work by five artists in an abandoned former bakery. Fittingly, when we got to the house, a young girl was handing out delicious warm home baked rhubarb muffins. When you got in the house however, you were greeted by a strong smell of anise seed, as one of the pieces was a room full of the Angelica plant, where a tent had been pitched in the middle. Within it sat a hippie like figure, humming and strumming a guitar.

Other pieces in the exhibition also had a happening feel to them, couple of simple sound works, a room where it said, it´s a little chilli outside, where the was actually a chilli hanging outside the window, and an stolen object, which was an actual stolen art piece from another exhibition at LungA, where the original artist, ended up coming to reclaim his artwork from the “new” artist.

The official program, was opened by a performance by Ása Dýradóttir and Karl Torsten Stallborn named The Hill Is Alive. The artists where placed at a little island in what the locals call “the lagoon”. The performance was in essence a ritual of both sound and fire, and in the end the hill woke up and replied.

After the performance, the other exhibitions opened. We had a quick stop at Árni Már Erlingssons and Sigurður Atli Sigurðssons exhibition Be Right Back, The Studio Is Closed. This time they where in, and the studio was chock full of people. We were lucky enough to have had snooped around them earlier in the day, and got a special class in DIY lithography, which will be the focus of an whole different article here on Snoop.

Next stop, was Harpa Einarsdóttir/ Ziska exhibition titled Instant Reflections… Take Out The Trash! which was the cleanest cut exhibition of the ones we visited. Harpas world is certainly a very vivid one, full of ancient versus modern symbolism, colours and lines and are reminiscent of a wild occult space world, which you can only glimpse through Harpas artwork.

The last exhibition we visited was Rögnvaldur Skúli Árnasons, So What Do You Think?. His exhibition was set in a oddly washed out red house, which apparently had been left almost untouched by the owners, who took up and moved to different towns a few years earlier. Aptly the exhibition was in the living room, where Skúli showed new oil paintings, made during the week at LungA. The small paintings, which were brilliant little studies of moments that had happened during the last week in Seyðisfjörður, including subjects like fellow artist, Árni Már, Seyðisfjörður it self and it´s scenery.

Last on the tour, was Byssukisis performance at the edge of town, where a group of people under enormous white sheet, moving to the beat of rocks being thrown at massive oil tanks. The event ended in the group jumping into the ocean after having sprayed furiously through the sheet and in the process covered themselves in brown paint.

Our night ended at the screening of the dance and music film Girl Walk // All Day by director Jacob Krupnick set to the music mash up from Dj Girl Walk. At the beginning the presenter said that there where only two prerequisites for them to show the film, which was that they needed to have an powerful sound system, which they certainly did, and there need to be a dance floor if the need to dance would catch the audience. We were happy too see the normally reserved Icelanders, all getting up and dancing through the whole movie!